Fascinating essay in the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section this past Sunday written by Yale Professor Anthony Kronman. Professor Kronman argues that American universities have given up on teaching the big, fundamental questions to their students in favor of specialized, practical, subject-based curriculum in increasing vogue over the past century. What is the meaning of life or, to put it another way, what is the art of living? Professor Kronman suggests that empirical research in the sciences has served the world well with breathtaking new discoveries, but it has been an ill-fit in the humanities leading to a tightening spiral of minutiae. In a shift of historic importance, America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. This abandonment has also helped create a society in which deeper questions of values are left in the hands of those motivated by religious conviction – a disturbing and dangerous development.
Over the past